he came for brief space amid the breakers. It is, indeed, rather wonderful that he kept peace so long with those most refractory subjects, the singers, than that it should fail at last. Fail at last it did! Handel was peremptory in his requisitions, the singing-birds obstinate in their disobedience; the public divided, and the majority went against Handel. The following little recital of one of his many difficulties, with his prima-donnas, exhibits his character with amusing fidelity.
“Having one day some words with Cuzzoni on her refusing to sing Cara Immagine in Ottone, ‘Oh Madame,’ said he, ‘je sais bien que vous êtes une veritable Diable, mais je vous ferai sçavoir, moi, que je suis Beelzebub le Chef des diables.’ With this he took her up by the waist, swearing that, if she made any more words, he would fling her out of the window. It is to be noted, (adds the biographer with Counsellor Pleydel-like facetiousness,) that this was formerly one of the methods of executing criminals in Germany, a process not unlike that of the Tarpeian rock, and probably derived from it.”—Life of Handel.
Senesino, too, was one of Handel’s malcontent aids, the same of whom the famous anecdote is told, thus given in the Life of Haydn.
“Senesino was to perform on a London theatre the character of a tyrant, in I know not what opera; the celebrated Farinelli sustained that of an oppressed prince. Farinelli, who had been giving concerts in the country, arrived only a few hours before the representation, and the unfortunate hero and the cruel tyrant saw one another for the first time on the stage. When Farinelli came to his first air, in which he supplicates for mercy, he sung it with such sweetness and expression, that the poor tyrant, totally forgetting himself, threw himself upon his neck and repeatedly embraced him.”
The refined sensibility and power of free abandonment to the life of the moment, displayed in this anecdote, had made Senesino the darling, the spoiled child of the public, so that they were ungrateful to their great father, Handel. But he could not bow to the breeze. He began life anew at the risk of the wealth he
